Some time ago I installed a Wiki on my PHP server and gave it the imaginative title CodeStore Wiki. Since then I've been adding bits of content here and there. It's a handy place to put the over-spill from this site. Things that don't seem to fit anywhere else.

Partly I've been doing this to get some experience with Wikis (which I still know very little about). Primarily I've been building it up with the intention of releasing it in to the wild. What I can't decide is a) whether it's of any use b) if I can be doing with the additional stress of running a Wiki.

Will it be useful? Not if I'm the only one adding content, as I can easily do that here, without the need for a Wiki. The power of the wiki is in letting lots of people build the content together. If you guys chip in then it could be really cool.

What are the dangers? Well, Wikis are one of the many targets of the spammer. Bots can edit them as easily as you guys can. It seems to have managed ok so far though. Hence I'm making it "public" today.

Although I'm undecided on its future, which depends mainly on how you guys take to it, please consider it a live system. Try and refrain from editing pages and adding sdfd fdsfdsf sd or the like. If you can't think of anything useful to say, say nothing. Please don't make a mess and respect other people's entries.

What will/should the content be? Who knows! Anything Domino-based I suppose. The growth of this and other wikis is entirely organic in nature and probably impossible to control. Let's see how it goes. If it goes well I will look for a way to link it in to codestore proper.

Comments

Wonderful idea. Sort of what I was hoping to see in the Codebin over at OpenNTF.org. I mean, it's one thing to have a bit of an idea, or some hints 'n' tips, but it's quite another to allow public cleanup and revisions of same in the same space. If there's decent participation, this could prevent a lot of the kludging and griping that goes on in this, well, quirky environment we work with.

Jake Howlett

Thu 21 Apr 2005 11:48

It's a good idea. Whether it works in practice is another thing.

I sometimes wonder about this "Notes community" of ours. Where are the movers and shakers? Why aren't they more vocal? It's like the ones with the great ideas hide away all year and come out to bloom only in Florida in January before going back in to hiding.

I don't expect people to have an in-depth working-knowledge of Wikis straight off. So far there have been a couple of links added to existing pages. What I hope to see is people creating new pages and adding fresh content. Maybe a starter course is need. I know it took me a while to work out a new page is created...

I'm not sure what you're getting at Jake. Who are the movers and shakers you're talking about? There have always been lots of places for people to contribute to the community. Just thinking of the places I've hung out over the past 12 years, there have been Usenet groups, mailing lists, notes.net forums, the old Walnut forum, the old WorldCom/Interliant forum, and the Lotus BP Forum. I've seen lots of the same folks showing up here, there and everywhere over the years. I think some of those voices might be movers and shakers.

Sure, some voices fade away for a time -- or even permanently, but new voices come along too. And in a lot of cases, the voices that seem to have faded away haven't really. They've just moved to another place in the same community. And now with blogs and wikis there are even more places to choose from. It's hard to keep up with who is participating where. I used to be the most frequent poster on one of the mailing lists, but I ended up cutting back drastically. And I was never more than an occasional poster on notes.net, but now I blog -- not usually a lot of technical content on my own blog, but some when I feel like I've got something to say -- and I comment on lots of other people's blogs, too. Not trying to be defensive here, really. I think what applies to me also applies to many others -- whether they are movers or shakers or not.

Given all the places one can go to participate in the community, I think that for any one wiki to succeed it needs a defined purpose and structure to attract people to contribute and to keep coming back.

-rich

Jake Howlett

Fri 22 Apr 2005 03:10

Not sure who I mean exactly Rich. As an example though think about the names you see on the list of presenters at LS each year. How many of them are familiar names? Sure some of them are, but most I've never heard of. If they've got something useful to pass on why do they only do it to two hundred people at a time, once a year. There must be some really clever folks out there who just keep quiet for the most part.

I know the Notes community is great and I don't doubt that. I just think there's something missing that I see in other communities on the web. We might have great forums, which are great if you need an answer, but I prefer the search for inspiration. I definitely don't find any of that at the LDD forums ;o)

I know we have a lot of "Domino blogs" now. But, if I'm brutally honest, I rarely take much away from them. In fact I now only bother reading a handful of them on a regular basis. With these handful of blogs there still are regular useful updates. But it really is only a handful, if that.

I do a lot to try and make you guys happy. Sometimes I feel it's in vain. Right now I just feel down about the whole thing. I'll perk up sooner or later. It's early in the morning - not the best time to respond I guess.

Romano Soprano

Fri 22 Apr 2005 04:19

Cheer up, Jake! What you're doing makes us happy a lot, no doubt. The only reason I don't contribute to your wiki (yet) is that almost everything I know I learned from your site. Well, notes-web-wise. So, no point repeating your tricks. Just give your (may I say 'our') wiki some more time.

laurens

Fri 22 Apr 2005 06:02

Well, it's not in vain what you do. We would like to contribute, but it is so hard to beat your level ;-)

A matter of perspective, perhaps. Most presenters got started on Usenet, on mailing lists, on notes.net formus or the like, and they'd probably all love to have time to blog or contribute to wikis or whatever... but in some cases they've found that they enjoy making their contribution through the conferences a bit more, and they've got to make a living and spend some time with their families. Nevertheless, in my aggregator, I count 20 bloggers whom I know are either regular or at least occasional presenters at Lotusphere and/or on "the circuit" (Advisor, View, H&T Verlag). Not all of them, including myself, post regularly on technical topics, but I don't know if you're aware of just how much time and effort it takes to do these presentations. I don't want to demean what you do here, or what any other blogger or contributor to the community in any other way does, or to minimize the time that you put into what you do. Let me be clear about that. I can only guess, but I'm sure that the time and effort you put in is very substantial. I do need to point out, however, that a typical conference presentation can easily involve 20 to 80 hours of work to write (depending on the amount of re-use from previous articles and presentations, and very dependent on the number and complexity of new demos that need to be prepared), plus there is dry-run practice time, and four to seven days combined of travel and conference time that must be commtted. And if you're working with a co-presenter there might also be teleconferences or even preparatory trips -- in one case my co-presenter and I each drove ten hours to meet for six hours halfway between our homes New Hampshire and Toronto. As a general rule, I allocate about two weeks of lost billing and one week of lost time with my family to every conference presentation. Compensation for all of this is minimal. And while a few presenters are successful in leveraging their appearances as marketing opportunities for their products and services, most are not and none that I know of count on it. A few manage to do this and also find time to blog regularly on technical topics or participate heavily in various forums, but most simply don't have the bandwidth available.